On the 20th August
2019 — the 51st day of the Toastmasters year — I made my 38th
club visit of the season to ACCA Toastmasters Club, serving as project
evaluator.
The Meeting
Structure
Jerry Lim served as
Toastmaster of the Day — managing the meeting’s flow and transitions. Ricky Peh handled timing. Jannie Gong counted the ahs — a role that
invariably produces useful data and occasionally produces existential anxiety
in the speakers being counted. Andrew
Gunawan presided over table topics.
The evaluators were Penny Anne
Radcliffe, Shirley Lee, Miranda Zhang, and me.
The Speeches
Ishita Banerjee spoke on
emotional intelligence — specifically its necessity for effective management in
the contemporary workplace, as opposed to the authoritarian models that
characterised earlier management culture. She addressed the psychological effects of
leaders failing to connect with their teams and the direct impact of that
failure on productivity.
The subject matter is well
supported by the research. Dr. Daniel Jay
Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence — particularly his 1995 book Emotional
Intelligence and his subsequent Harvard Business Review article What
Makes a Leader, published in 1998 — established that emotional intelligence
accounts for approximately 90% of what distinguishes high performers from
average performers in senior leadership roles, across a range of industries and
organisations. The Centre for Creative
Leadership has documented that the primary causes of executive derailment
include difficulty managing relationships, difficulty leading teams, and
difficulty adapting to change — all of which are emotional intelligence
failures rather than technical competence failures.
The authoritarian model she
contrasted this with is not merely outdated stylistically. It is demonstrably
counterproductive. Research from Gallup
consistently shows that approximately 70% of the variance in employee
engagement is attributable to the manager. A manager who leads through fear, compliance,
and hierarchical authority rather than trust, connection, and genuine
engagement produces the disengagement that Gallup documents — and disengagement
costs the global economy an estimated US$8.8 trillion annually, or
approximately 9% of global GDP.
Ishita’s speech addressed a
real and quantifiable problem. The
quality of the address was appropriate to the subject’s seriousness.
Jane Yeo presented a personal
narrative about her interests — the kind of speech that develops the
foundational skill of making the personal universally accessible. The narrative speech is among the most
demanding in the Toastmasters curriculum precisely because it requires the
speaker to trust that their specific experience contains something the audience
can recognise in their own lives. When
it works, it is the most powerful category of speech. When it does not, it is an account of someone
else’s holiday that the audience has been too polite to escape.
Jiang Xiao Ying completed
another advanced manual project — this one focused on getting to the point. The specific irony of a speech about concision
being delivered in an advanced manual context — where the expectations of depth
and development are higher than in the standard curriculum — was presumably not
lost on the speaker. Executing a speech
that demonstrates the virtue of brevity while meeting the requirements of an
advanced project requires a specific kind of discipline. The discipline of knowing what to leave out is
always harder than the discipline of putting things in.
The Best Speech:
Leo Zhang Li on Sugar
Leo Zhang Li delivered what
the room judged the best speech of the evening — a comprehensive examination of
sugar’s effects on human health and its prevalence across processed and organic
food categories. He won Best Speaker. He also, in doing so, ruined the break.
The timing of this speech —
delivered immediately before the interval, when the meeting’s refreshments were
presumably waiting — was either accidental or a work of dark comic genius. Every item on the refreshment table was
subsequently eyed with the specific suspicion that detailed nutritional
knowledge produces. The audience had
arrived at the break with appetites. They arrived with information instead.
The World Health Organisation
recommends limiting free sugar intake to less than 10% of total daily energy
intake — and notes that a reduction to below 5% would provide additional health
benefits. The average Singaporean
consumes approximately 60 grams of free sugar daily — more than double the WHO
recommendation. The connections between
excess sugar consumption and obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
and dental caries are documented across decades of epidemiological research. Leo’s speech communicated this effectively.
The refreshments communicated the problem immediately afterwards.
Best Evaluator:
Penny Anne Radcliffe
Penny Anne Radcliffe took Best
Evaluator — a deserved recognition. Evaluation
is the most technically demanding role in a Toastmasters meeting. It requires the evaluator to observe the
speech in real time, identify specific strengths and specific development areas
with concrete examples, frame the feedback constructively without either
excessive praise or unnecessary harshness, and deliver it within a two to three-minute
window in front of an audience. The
evaluator who does this well demonstrates more of the Toastmasters skill set in
three minutes than most speakers demonstrate in seven.
Best Table Topics:
Guest
For the second time in recent
visits, the Best Table Topics Speaker award went to a guest — an outcome that
is simultaneously encouraging and instructive.
Encouraging, because it means the club is attracting guests of
sufficient quality and comfort to participate and perform well in an impromptu
speaking format, which they have not specifically trained for. Instructive, because it means the members who
have been training for exactly this format are being outperformed by someone
walking in without preparation. The
correct response to this outcome is not to begrudge the guest their award. It
is to practise table topics with sufficient regularity that the next visit
produces a different result.
The Assessment
ACCA Toastmasters ran a
well-structured meeting with substantive content across the speech programme. The emotional intelligence speech addressed a
real professional need with appropriate depth. The sugar speech informed and disturbed in
equal measure, which is what a well-researched informative speech should do.
Terence Nunis, DTM
| Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters |
Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
